Gratuitous Sins

Gratuitous Sins

    The Republic of Ireland at one time was a total Catholic Church dictatorship. The only opinion that was tolerated was the opinion of the Irish Catholic Church. All organs of the Irish State organisations which did not support the Irish Catholic Church view of hating single women and their offsprings were banished and hated rhetoric stemmed from the many Catholic Church altars throughout Ireland, which were used effectually to bind Irish State organisations into fear and disquiet. Essentially all Irish State organisations in the Republic of Ireland were now linked directly to the Irish Catholic Church. Everyone in the Republic of Ireland was captured into fear of some kind, many of their jobs depended on their loyalty to the Irish clerics.

    During the rise to power of the powerful Irish Catholic Church Clerics, erosion of freedom in Irish society was factual. Laws were incrementally amended. Unwed women and their children were legally not considered human so it was not possible to be charged with crimes against these women nor their children. In the Republic of Ireland at the time there was severe poverty, millions of Irish families were living in abject destitution, depending on the merger handouts of the controlling Irish Catholic Church. The great slums of central Dublin with their large families, some families having upward of eighteen or more children all living in one or two rooms, was the norm. Dublin had the worst housing conditions with its extensive slums which were not limited to the back-streets of the capital city or to impoverished ghettos. The rundown tenements in inner-city of Dublin were filthy, overcrowded, disease-ridden, overrun and teeming with malnourished children. The decay of Dublin was epitomised by the many streets in and around the city centre which was overflowing with poverty and death.  Very large families was the norm then, in some houses in the centre of Dublin there were 10 or 15 families living in just one house, that was over 100 people, men, women and children. Their were no indoor toilets or bathrooms, the back lanes to many of the houses, was the toilet, life in the Dublin slums was raw and desperate. Death emphasised the precariousness of life for the poor, Dublin tenement dwellers died very young, many died more often from tuberculosis, many children died in childhood, in all this horror the Irish Catholic Church thrived and profited.

    The poor of Dublin were also failed by the Irish Catholic Church, which had a conservative approach to state relief of poverty, no Irish State intervention, despite the fact that all that lived in the slums were Catholics. Poverty was the preserve of Irish Catholic Church creed. The Irish Catholic Church was only concerned with saving souls, and all must be baptised into the Catholic Religion, then if they died they would be saved into another and better life elsewhere. Many of these children of the slums of Dublin, themselves, ended up in confinement. There were several penitentiaries for children across the city, including High Park Reformatory for Girls, most of whom were committed for having sex outside Catholic marriage, and for all manner of reasons, like stealing food to fed their hungry children. Boys could also be sent to prison for petty misdemeanours, like begging in the streets  or to Industrial Schools, brutal prisons for children run by the Religious Orders, the Christian Brothers,  such as the one in Artane, in Dublin. Some children were forced to turn to prostitution to survive on the streets or in brothels, and if caught they, too, ended up in the Industrial Schools in Ireland. 
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    One of the key methods that the Irish Catholic Church used successfully, was the new medium of Irish Radio broadcasting. Strange as it may seem today, but a priest or bishop speaking at the time on the radio was taken as gospel, why to many Irish people listening, a very holy man was speaking, and would never twist the truth, so it must be true. Irish people were gullible and believed everything that they heard on the Irish radio. Some of the Irish Catholic Church’s disgustingly deceptive hate propagandising was very effective, especially against unwed mothers and their children. Unwed Mothers and their Children had been escalating to murderous levels by the many clerics of the Irish Catholic Church.This unnatural hatred of unwed Mothers and their Children that was seething for decades in Catholic Ireland was really about controlling a woman’s body, how, why and when to have sex in the Catholic way. This hatred of unwed Mothers and their Children that was already deeply ingrained into the Irish public psyche. Most Irish people had embraced Irish Christian doctrine without protest, because throughout most of Ireland’s history, Irish Catholic religion and the rule of secular Law were inseparable and the Irish Catholic Church rulers often appealed to their ignorant believers by using Roman Catholic Church doctrine to demonise unwed mothers and their children. The Irish Clerics justify what they were doing  as God's will to eliminate or contain the unwed mothers and their children. As for the unwed women and their children they must be persecuted for their gratuitous sins often with direct violence by the Irish Catholic Church rulers.
Owen Felix O’Neill